Development Methodology

Blue Lizard Games’ Senior Developer Christian Cartes swung by the MechWarrior Tactics forums, and shed a little light on the deep, dark corners of Software Development – Blue Lizard style.

Christian confirms that BLG is using the Iterative (AGILE in some places) development..which blurs the lines between traditional phases (alpha, beta..etc) of software releases even further.  He also reveals that BLG has had to completely rewrite some of the backend modules that RoadHouse had already completed, in order to get the BGL written features implemented.  I guess that’s part of the risk of taking over a project mid-stream..no matter how good the previous guys are/were… they might do things just differently enough, that things need to be re-written to flow with the new code.

Christian does a good job (I think) of detailing the back and forth that happens between the Designers, and the guys doing the programming.  It shows that what seems like a good design ‘on paper’, might not always work out – or be possible to implement, in the way you thought.

Skipping a bit in this stage of development and the complexity of the code, there are certain times when changing and redesigning a component can end up being too expensive. Here, we rethink the design analyze it, trying to be as close as possible to the first solution proposed, but searching for other options. After this process, we can implement a first version of a module or component. Here, after we work closely with the Design team, the module is submitted to the iteration cycle, until is ready to go to a dev or production stage for testing.

 

Overall, the post provides some good insight into the development process at BGL, and I hope the recent trend of the BGL folks popping onto the forums to give us a peek into their process continues.

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